lorin schultz

Soli said:

I know my desire is unpopular, but I'd personally like to see Apple address this by dropping the PSU (and EarPods) from all iDevices. This would save money and waste on many levels, including making the box considerably smaller which means they could both ship and store more units of all their iDevices in the same space. They could offer both a USB-A and USB-C-to-Lighting cables, or both a USB-C-to-Lighting cable with a USB-A(m)-to-USB-C(f) adapter for a year or two, since cables do wear out over time, are much less expensive, and require much fewer harder to recycle parts that aren't nearly as bad for landfills.

It continues to irk me that buying apple's most expensive laptop means that I also have to buy expensive cables to replace the ones that come with Apple products. Instead of saddling me with another USB-A cable I can't use and making me buy a stupidly expensive replacement, I wish Apple would at least give me a choice!

The little SanDisk external SSD I picked up for a gig a few weeks ago solves the problem brilliantly (see photo). I'd like to see more vendors adopt this approach.

commentzilla said:

My graphic is about the port not the cable.

Whoops, I see that now. Sorry, I mis-read.

You wrote: "If you have Thunderbolt then there is no guess work on the port side..."

My response should have been: "But all bets are off on the starboard side."

macplusplus said:

lorin schultz said:

macplusplus said:

lorin schultz said:

Is there an option to save in a format with LESS compression instead of even more?

I don't store thousands of photos on my phone and have lots of storage capacity so file size isn't an issue. Image quality is. It would be nice to have a choice of something lossless, or at least only gently compressed. It makes editing so much easier.

Just leave the Camera setting as HEIC, as shown in the article. Since that setting also affects video compression, setting it to JPEG will unnecessairly revert to H264 instead of H265, then the video will take twice more space.

There is no point to get obsessive-compulsive with the iPhone camera if yours is a recent model. There are some apps that saves in RAW format but these may create more problems than they resolve to non-OCD people.

Thanks for the advice, but as I mentioned, space is not a consideration for me. Quality is, particularly since the vast majority of what I capture, still or video, is not the end product but an element to be incorporated into a larger project. H.264 is a pain at the editing stage, and H.265 is even worse. Same situation with JPEG and HEIC.

Just out of curiosity, how H264 can be a pain at the editing stage? It is almost the default codec today with all its standard and pop-culture variants. I understand that H265 may not be needed in much of the cases, but the issues with H264 should not be that severe right now?

There are two major problems with H.264 as a source for post-production.

The first is the frame structure. One of the ways H.264 reduces file size is to record only "unique" pixels for most frames. It only stores a complete picture in any particular frame when it absolutely has to. So it starts with a complete picture for Frame 1. For frame 2, it records only what has changed since Frame 1, not a whole image. Same with Frames 3, 4, 5, etc. until there's enough change to force a new full-picture, like on a cut to a different shot.

The editing software obviously can't work on a partial frame, so the editor is either restricted to only being able to cut and make changes where full frames exist, or the footage has to be converted into a format that compares the partial frames to the full frames and reconstructs full images for each frame. That is obviously a time-consuming process. (Some software will do the conversion in the background so it's invisible to the user, using terms like "rendering," but it still takes time and limits what the editor can do while it's processing.)

I gotta figure something like this would be simple to implement. From the top:

1: Thunderbolt logo with version. Remove if not applicable. Version number assumes Thunderbolt 4 will continue to use the USB-C connector.

2. USB logo with version number. Remove if not applicable.

3. Power rating.

4. A for Active, P for Passive. Remove for USB-only implementations.

How easy is that? Where do we send this to get it implemented?

tboy said:

Hello, Is the new macmini graphic card able to handle à 4K screen @ 2160 x 1440 resolution ? Thank you

That depends on what you mean by "handle." If you mean pick it up and physically manipulate it, probably not, as the integrated GPU in the mini has no thumbs.

If you mean "can it drive a 4K display at lower than native resolution" the answer is yes.

EDIT: Sorry, I enjoyed the stupid joke too much to keep it to myself. That aside, did you really mean to type 2160 x 1440, or did you mean 2560 x 1440? I actually don't know if you can dial in a specific pixel-value resolution, only that it can be scaled.